Who Fears Death

Born into post-apocalyptic Africa to a mother who was raped after the slaughter of her entire tribe, Onyesonwu is tutored by a shaman and discovers that her magical destiny is to end the genocide of her people.

Comment

A breathtaking novel. Nnedi Okorafor is one of the best authors writing today. Please be mindful of the content warnings: the book deals with a lot of difficult and graphic subjects. This is one of my new favorites, and I highly recommend it to all sci-fi lovers.

Content Warning: This book contains explicit scenes and discussions of sexual assault. This book so fully immersed me in its world that I could hardly think critically about it as I was too focused on the story itself. An uplifting page turner, this book gets right to the heart of modern race and gender relations through its Afro-futurism lens. I can't wait to read more by this author.

Given how white and male the sci-fi world is (less so in fantasy), it's refreshing to come across a book written from a different perspective. Nnedi Okorafor is a Nigerian American writer and "Who Fears Death" is set in a post-apocalyptic Africa. Okorafor uses the genre to deal with more serious issues like racism, violence, rape, and women's rights. I don't think you have to be a fan of sci-fi to enjoy this.

Once this gets made, assuming this gets made well, we are in for one heck of a TV show. This book is fantastic. It's immersive, imaginative, brutal, and beautiful. Onye, our lead character, is a child of rape and her and her mother live as nomads in the desert until they reach a town where they may be able to have a normalish life. That's not Onye's fate and her fate is to be a force to be reckoned with. She has magical powers, she's going to change the world, and she has to fight tooth and nail with friends and foes to get an inch of respect. She makes mistakes, for sure. She's headstrong, angry, and that has its own consequences.

This is truly fantastic. Seriously. I didn't know all that much about it when I started reading it and I'm trying to give you that same experience by being a little vague. Give it a try, you won't regret it.

Onyesonwu is the child of rape, and this is only the first of many brutal and violent events that are recounted in great detail in the opening of pages of Who Fears Death. For anyone who might struggle with reading about rape and female genital cutting, this book and this review may not be for you. A variety of violent deaths are also graphically depicted, including more than one woman being killed by stoning, and another woman who is torn limb from limb by an angry mob. The violence is generally motivated by either the race or gender of the victim(s) and often by both. While the graphic depictions let up somewhat in the later part of the book, I honestly struggled to continue reading after making it through the first hundred pages. It took me two weeks to get through the book, though I put it down for a week in the middle. Full review: https://shayshortt.com/2016/09/15/who-fears-death/

Haunting. There are some amazing friendships between women here, with all their ups and downs. Onyesonwu herself was realistically flawed - her blind spots actually led her to make catastrophic errors, which was occasionally frustrating but ultimately made her deeply compelling as a protagonist. I also loved how Okorafor rendered the complexity of being in a romantic relationship with someone who both gets you like no one else does, yet is also deeply prejudiced about what you can be or accomplish because of your gender.

I am a book critic & review for a living, so I need "guilty pleasure" reads to keep me sane.

Thus far, this is hands-down my favorite guilty-pleasure read of 2016. Nnedi comes out of the YA world and it's evident in her tight plotting and accessible writing, but I also never felt she was talking down to me.

Moderately graphic at times, I had to skim or even skip sections, but I absolutely adore the breadth of issues addressed by this story. No conclusive answers or solutions, but so much to talk and think about: racism, genocide, religion, rape, incest, power dynamics in relationships, friendship, sexuality, fgm, prostitution, fate, and of course death and what comes after. All this in a beautifully written piece of dystopian futuristic fantasy. I did knock a star off because I feel the ending was rushed and some character deaths were not as emotional as they should have been due to how they were written.

Summary

Onyesonwu is Ewu, a child born of the violence that the Nuru have long visited upon the Okeke people they have enslaved in post-apocalyptic Sudan. Nuru and Okeke alike regard her as an abomination, but she is protected by her determined mother, and her highly respected adoptive father. Her magical talents begin to manifest early, setting her even further apart from her Okeke peers in the village of Jwahir. But things begin to change when she meets Mwita, an Ewu boy with connections to the village sorcerer, Aro, who has never agreed to take a woman as his student. Her untrained power ties her to a larger destiny, one will impact the future of Nuru and Okeke alike.